Stevan
Harnad
Canada
Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences
Universite
du Quebec a Montreal
Montreal,
Quebec, Canada H3C
3P8
and
Department
of Electronics and Computer Science
University
of Southampton
Highfield,
Southampton, United Kingdom SO17 1BJ
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
ABSTRACT: Jerry
Fodor argues that Darwin was wrong about "natural selection" because
(1) it is only a tautology rather than a scientific law that can
support
counterfactuals ("If X had happened, Y would have happened") and
because (2) only minds can select. Hence Darwin's analogy with
"artificial
selection" by animal breeders was misleading and evolutionary
explanation
is nothing but post-hoc historical narrative. I argue that Darwin was
right on
all counts. Until Darwin's "tautology," it had been believed that
either (a) God had created all organisms as they are, or (b) organisms
had
always been as they are. Darwin revealed instead that (c) organisms
have
heritable traits that evolved across time through random variation,
with
survival and reproduction in (changing) environments determining
(mindlessly) which
variants were successfully transmitted to the next generation. This not
only
provided the (true) alternative (c), but also the methodology for
investigating
which traits had been adaptive, how and why; it also led to the
discovery of the
genetic mechanism of the encoding, variation and evolution of heritable
traits.
Fodor also draws erroneous conclusions from the analogy between
Darwinian
evolution and Skinnerian reinforcement learning. Fodor's skepticism
about both
evolution and learning may be motivated by an overgeneralization of
Chomsky's "poverty of the stimulus argument" -- from the origin of
Universal Grammar (UG)
to the origin of the "concepts" underlying word meaning, which, Fodor
thinks, must
be "endogenous," rather than evolved or learned.
KEYWORDS: adaptation,
Chomsky, consciousness, counterfactuals, Darwin, evolution, fitness,
Fodor,
learning, lexicon, mind, natural selection, poverty of the stimulus,
Skinner,
Turing, underdetermination, universal grammar
This is an essay on Jerry
Fodor's Hugues Leblanc Lecture Series
at UQAM on "What Darwin Got Wrong" (Fodor, forthcoming; Fodor &
Piatelli-Palmarini).
I begin with my
own 16-point summary of Fodor's position
(as I understand it), followed by point-by-point commentary on that
summary.
(Note that the commentary is on my own version of Fodor's position. I
will be
happy to correct miconstruals, if any.)
(1) Darwin's
theory of evolution is
not a "covering-law" scientific theory of the sort we have (for
example) with the laws of physics. It does not "support
counterfactuals"
(i.e., "This is what would have happened if that had happened") in
the way Newton's "F = ma" does.
(2) Rather,
Darwin's theory looks
much closer to a tautology.
(3)
Fodor expressed the principle of "Natural
Selection" (PNS) in words to the effect that:
PNS:
"There is natural variation of (heritable) traits, and, from that
(heritable) variation, 'Natural Selection' 'selects for'
those
traits that confer the greater 'fitness' (in much the same way
that, in
Artificial Selection, the animal breeder selects for the traits
he
prefers)."
(4) Fodor's
criticism of this
principle was that artificial selection does indeed work this
way: the
breeder selects the traits he has in mind, and if they also happen to
be
correlated with other traits, we can find out exactly which traits he
was
actually selecting for by asking the breeder which one(s) he was
selecting for.
(5) But with
natural selection we
do not have this, because no one has any traits "in mind." So it
makes no sense to say that there was something (namely, increased
"fitness") that natural selection somehow "selected for,"
because "selecting for" is something only minds do, intentionally,
and "natural selection" has no mind.
(6) So the
theory of natural
selection is wrong.
(7) Not only
wrong, but empty,
since PNS does not predict or explain what will happen in any given
situation:
We have to look at the actual history in any given case, and then come
up with
a (possibly true, but post-hoc) explanation of the outcome in that
particular
case.
(8) And in order
to find out which
(of potentially very many) correlated traits were the ones that
actually caused
the organisms that had them to survive and reproduce better, the
biologist has
to do further experiments and simulations -- something that "natural
selection" itself did not do, and has no way of doing.
(9) So
evolutionary explanation is
really just post-hoc historical explanation; there is no underlying
"covering law," and Darwin's notion of "natural selection"
is tautological, mentalistic, and explains nothing.
(10) Fodor also
pointed out that
much the same thing is true (and for much the same reasons) not
just of
evolution but of "learning" -- in particular, Skinner's
reinforcement learning:
(11) When an
organism is rewarded
by the trainer for doing one thing (choosing a green triangle) rather
than
another (choosing something other than a green triangle), it is not
even clear
-- without further experiments -- what the animal is choosing from
among these
correlated features (something that's both green and a triangle, or
anything
that's green, or anything that's triangular, or...), just as it is
unclear in
evolution which of multiple correlated traits is the adaptive trait.
(12) And people
(at least) choose
on the basis of what they have in mind (as the animal breeder does).
(13) Skinner was
wrong to imagine
that the shape that behavior takes is a result of reinforcement, just
as Darwin
was wrong to think that the shape that organisms take is a result of
"natural selection".
(14) Skinner was
wrong because
reinforcement learning is unable to explain why people do what they do:
their
mental states (beliefs, desires, etc.) explain it, and Skinner ignored
those.
(15) So
psychology has the option
of studying the true causes of what people do, which are mental
(whereas
Skinnerian learning explains next to nothing).
(16) But biology
does not even have
this option of studying the "true" mental causes of evolutionary
outcomes, because there are no mental causes, so all that's left is
post-hoc
historical explanation.
Now some
comments:
(1)
Darwin's theory of evolution is not a "covering-law" scientific
theory of the sort we have (for example)
with the laws of physics. It does not "support
counterfactuals" (i.e., "This is what would have happened if that had
happened") in the way Newton's "F = ma" does.
This is true,
but I think everyone (including Darwin) already
recognized it. The principle of natural selection is not meant
to be a
"law." Before Darwin, there were two views of why organisms have the
traits they have: (i) God created them with those traits (creation
theory) or
(ii) creatures are as they always were ("steady state" theory).
Darwin suggested
the third (and true) alternative which
is that, no, creatures did not always have the traits they now have:
They
evolved that way, in real time, from earlier creatures. Their traits
vary from
creature to creature, and some of the variants are heritable. So the
(heritable) traits of present-day organisms are those that helped their
ancestors pass on those very traits more successfully than other
(heritable)
variants in that ancestral environment:
The
methodological consequence of this original and
productive insight is that biologists should investigate which traits
are
heritable, what the mechanism of the heritability is (it turned out to
be
genes), and what it was in the ancestral environment that made some
traits more
successfully transmissible than others (and how, and why).
(For some
reason, Fodor tends to speak uniformly of "phenotypes" even when he
should be saying "genotypes." An organism's genotype
codes its heritable traits. The organism's phenotype is the joint
result of the
expression [through growth and development] of its heritable traits, as
modulated by its nonheritable traits, which may be environment-induced
or
acquired ones. Only heritable [hence genotypic] traits are transmitted
genetically, through reproduction, to the next generation – although
some
phenotypic traits may be transmitted culturally; Sperber & Cladire
2006.)
(2)
Rather, Darwin's theory looks much closer to a tautology.
It is not quite
a tautology, and precisely in the
respects that it is not a tautology lies its great theoretical
and
especially methodological value.
That today's
heritable traits are those of yesterday's
heritable traits that caused the creatures inheriting them to be more
successful, in their environment, in surviving and reproducing thanks
to (some
of) those very traits, is indeed a tautology -- once you realize the
consequences of the fact that there does indeed exist such a heritable
variation/retention process; but not without that realization. And
that is
the realization we owe to Darwin.
It was neither
obvious before Darwin -- nor is it true a-priori,
as a matter of necessity -- that there exists heritable variation
underlying
creatures' traits, and that the survival/reproduction advantages --
i.e., the
adaptive advantages -- of those heritable traits in creatures'
ancestral environments
were what shaped the current traits of creatures across time. Hence it
was not
obvious that that was what you had to investigate if you wanted to know
what
traits had evolved in what environments, as a result of what adaptive
advantages. But the general principle itself does not identify any
particular
trait of any particular creature in any particular environment.
(3)
Fodor expressed the principle of "Natural Selection" (PNS) in
words to the effect that:
PNS: "There
is natural variation of (heritable) traits, and, from that (heritable)
variation, 'Natural Selection'
'selects for' those
traits that confer the greater 'fitness'
(in much the same way that, in Artificial Selection, the animal breeder
selects for the traits he
prefers)."
This formulation
of the PNS is correct, but a more explicit
and perspicuous way to put it (with more words but fewer metaphors)
would be:
PNS: "There
is natural variation of (heritable) traits, and,
from that (heritable) variation, it is the relative success of the
creatures
that inherit the traits, in surviving and
reproducing in a particular environment, that determines which
traits are passed
on to the next generation (in much the same way that, in Artificial
Selection,
the animal breeder selects for
the traits he prefers)."
Notice that
there has been no need at all to mention
either "Natural Selection," which is just a metaphor, nor
"fitness," which really just means "the relative success of the
heritable
variants in a given environment."
Success in
survival/reproduction -- determined by the effects of the
environment on the
distribution of heritable traits in the next generation -- is what
replaces
the intentional choices of the selective animal breeder by a mindless
process.
More generally,
the case of the effects of the
intentional choices of selective breeders is just a very special -- and
until
very recently, highly atypical -- case of this same, general, mindless
process,
namely, the transmission success of
heritable traits being determined by the causal contingencies of
the
environment in which they occur: Mindful animal breeding is just one
of
those environments. Moreover, mindfulness itself is just one
-- or
several -- of those evolved, heritable traits: It is often the
traits of
one organism that constitute part of the environment of another
organism,
whether within or between species.
(4)
Fodor's criticism of this principle was that artificial selection
does indeed work this way: the breeder selects the traits he has in
mind, and
if they also happen to be correlated with other traits, we can find out
exactly
which traits he was actually selecting for by asking the breeder which
one(s)
he was selecting for.
(5)
But with natural selection we do not have this, because no one has any
traits
"in mind." So it makes no sense to say that there was something
(namely, increased "fitness") that natural selection somehow
"selected for," because "selecting for" is something minds
do, intentionally, and "natural selection" has no mind.
(6)
So the theory of natural selection is wrong.
This is the
wrong conclusion to draw.
The Darwinian
mechanism of adaptation -- with blind
variation of heritable traits in one generation, and then reproductive
transmission-success in the given environment determining the
distribution of
those traits in the next generation -- is an original, ingenious (and
true!)
explanation not only of how and why creatures have the (heritable)
traits they
have, but of the relation between evolution in general, and human
animal
breeding in particular: The distribution of heritable traits is always
determined by how successful they make their bearers in surviving and
reproducing, but in the special case of human-bred animals it happens
to be
conscious humans that are "culling out" the creatures with the
"maladaptive" traits (rather than, say, hungry predators doing it).
(7)
Not only wrong, but empty, since PNS does not predict or explain what
will
happen in any given situation: We have to look at the actual history in
any
given case, and then come up with a (possibly true, but post-hoc)
explanation
of the outcome in that particular case.
It's certainly
true that, apart from the original,
ingenious (and true!) explanation of how heritable traits evolve in
general,
Darwin's PNS "merely" provides a methodology for investigating what
happened in particular cases (particular traits, particular creatures,
particular environments).
(8)
And in order to find out which (of potentially very many) correlated
traits
were the ones that actually caused the organisms that had them to
survive and
reproduce better, the biologist has to do further experiments and
simulations –
something that "natural selection" itself did not do, and has no way
of doing.
The only thing
evolution "does" is change the
trait distribution from generation to generation as a function of
environmental
contingencies and their effects on survival/reproductive success. If
there are
correlated traits, where one of them is the causally effective one and
the
others just happen to be coupled with it, evolution could not "care"
less (until and unless some of the correlated traits turn into a disadvantage
for survival and reproduction).
Unlike the
calculus of variations or even ordinary
engineering, evolution does not optimize; it does not even wield
Occam's Razor
(at least not in this particular respect): As Herbert Simon (1996) put
it,
evolution merely "provisionally 'satisfices'" (which just means -- let
us hasten to point out, lest someone is again tempted to give it a
mentalistic
interpretation! -- that the winners, from the prior generation, just
have to be
better than the current competition, not all possible
competition; hence
no "counterfactual-supportingness" here either! "Fitness" is local,
provisional, relative and approximate, not global, permanent, absolute,
or
exact, like F=ma).
If we are
interested in whether it is the fox's
swiftness or its (correlated)
smooth tail that is the cause of its adaptive success, we will have to
manipulate experimentally to find out (as some experimental as well as
computational biologists do).
(9)
So evolutionary explanation is really just post-hoc historical
explanation;
there is no underlying "covering law," and Darwin's notion of
"natural selection" is tautological, mentalistic, and explains
nothing.
Tautological,
yes, to a degree. But PNS is not the first
tautology to be discovered, and to prove productive, having previously
not been
known, or noticed. (The law of the excluded middle is perhaps another.)
And PNS
is not a pure tautology (which would have taken the form: "whatever
happens,
happens"). There is the restriction to heritable traits (rather
than all
traits), which led, amongst other things, to the discovery of the
mechanism of
their heritability (genes and DNA).
But, yes, to say
that "the distribution of
heritable traits in generation N is determined by the inheritance
success of
the distribution of heritable traits in generation N-1" is
tautological;
it's just that this (true) tautology had never occurred to anyone
before
Darwin. They either thought that traits came from God, or that they had
always
been there and simply varied randomly.
There is nothing
mentalistic whatsoever here; insead we
have the mechanical key to the explanation of the origin and diversity
of all
heritable traits.
(10)
Fodor also pointed out that much the same thing is true (and for much
the same
reasons) not just of evolution but of "learning" -- in
particular, Skinner's reinforcement learning.
It is true (and
has been pointed out by many others too)
that both Skinner's reinforcement learning and Darwin's adaptive
evolution are
based on random-variation plus differential-retention-by-consequences
(Catania
& Harnad 1988).
But the analogy
ends there. Skinner tried to explain the
"shape" of all behavior as having been determined by
random-variation
(in responses emitted by the organism) plus reward ("selection by
consequences"). Skinner even has an (implicit and unintended) analogy
with
animal breeders' artificial selection vs "natural selection": the
analogy between animal trainers' "artificial reinforcement" (for
doing the performance tricks) and the "natural reinforcement" in our
(and other animals') natural lives that "rewards and trains us" to
perform as we do.
But most natural
behavior is not explained or
explainable as the result of shaping by Skinnerian reinforcement. In
particular, the (universal) grammatical "shape" of language (UG) is
not learned or learnable by children through reinforcement training,
because of
the "poverty-of-the-stimulus": What the child hears and says, and
what corrections (reinforcements) it receives during its brief
language-learning period, are demonstrably too underdetermined to be
able to
learn UG from -- either via Skinner reinforcement learning or via any
other
learning mechanism. There just are not enough data (especially negative
data:
errors and error-corrections), or time (Chomsky 1980).
The same,
however, is not true of the evolution of
heritable biological traits: For the evolution of today's organisms'
heritable
traits (their gene pool) there has been plenty of time, and of positive
and
negative data, in the 4 billion years since the "primal soup" (Dawkins
1976). In other words, there is no evolutionary
"poverty-of-the-stimulus" problem with the evolution or evolvability
of heritable traits, through random variation plus retention as
determined by
their adaptive consequences. (My guess is that Fodor, in his
heart of
hearts, thinks that there is such a poverty-of-the-stimulus
problem with
the evolution of biological traits, and that that is what motivates his
scepticism about both learning and evolution! Fodor & Pylyshyn 1988)
Four billion
years is plenty more time and data
than the child's c. 4 language-learning years for evolving all
heritable
traits. It is not clear, though, that even that is enough time or
data to
evolve UG! But that's a very special case. Chomsky (1959)
could have refuted Skinner (and did) with
a lot more than just that: Reinforcement learning does not explain the
"shape" of most nontrivial behavior, probably because a lot of human
and animal behavior is not the result of reinforcement learning during
the
lifetime of the organism. Some of it evolved earlier; and some of human
behavior is taught, or self-taught, via reasoning. Besides, even
behaviors that
are learnable via reinforcement learning are not explained until one
provides
the internal design of the learner that is capable of learning them
(via
reinforcement learning): Some behavior may indeed be learnable through
trial-and-error-correction alone, but how do we have to be built in
order to
be capable of learning it through trial-and-error-correction
alone?
This calls for
the kind of computational and robotic
modeling of our total performance capacity that Turing (1950)
called for (and that Skinner's impoverished, a-theoretical
"reinforcement
schedules" certainly did not and could not provide; Harnad 1996).
But that does not mean that there aren't mechanisms for
general trial-and-error-correction-based learning. (That is what a
lot of
computational learning theory, including neural net learning, is all
about;
Harnad 2009).
Since no one yet knows the scope of general
learning theory, no one is in a position to say what it can or cannot
do, except
in special cases where you do have a poverty-of-the-stimulus argument
-- which
no one does have, either for human learning ability in general, or for
heritable traits in general, but only for the single special case of UG.
(11)
When an organism is rewarded by the trainer for doing one thing
(choosing a
green triangle) rather than another (choosing something other than a
green
triangle), it is not even clear -- without further experiments -- what
the
animal is choosing from among these correlated features (something
that's both
green and a triangle, or anything that's green, or anything that's
triangular,
or...), just as it is unclear in evolution which of multiple correlated
traits
is the adaptive trait.
This is
certainly true. So in the case of learning, you
do the further experiments to see which of the correlated features the
animal
is actually using; and in the case of evolution, you do the further
experiments
to see which of the correlated traits are actually causing the
reproductive/survival advantage.
This is part of
doing the actual science. It in no way
impugns Darwin with having had to make illicit use of any nonexistent
"mindfulness"
in any way. It does not even impugn Skinner with that. It is merely
another
flaw in Skinner that, besides being oblivious to the limits on what can
be
explained as being just the outcome of reinforcement learning, he
ignored the
fact that people have minds and often do things because they've made up
their
minds to do them. Of course, that fact is not an explanation either.
But
neither is Skinnerian reinforcement an explanation of the nature or
origins of
our mental powers. (Darwinian evolution, on the other hand, is very
likely to
be!)
But, in any
case, experimentally unbundling and testing
correlated variables is not a problem or handicap
to either Skinner
or Darwin. It is perfectly normal science.
(12)
And people (at least) choose on the basis of what they have in mind (as
the
animal breeder does).
That's bad news
for Skinner, because he can't account
for our mental capacities with reinforcement learning.
But it's not bad
news for Darwin, in any way.
Our cognitive
capacities (including our learning
capacities -- inasmuch as they are heritable rather than acquired
traits)
are simply a subset of the traits that evolution (including neural and
behavioral evolution) needs to account for. These cognitive capacities
are far
from having been accounted for yet; but there is nothing at all in
Fodor's
critique of Darwin (or even of Skinnerian reinforcement learning) that
implies
that they will not or cannot be accounted for: There is no
"poverty-of-the-stimulus" argument here.
And the
"intentionality" argument against PNS
is not an argument, but a misunderstanding of Darwin's "selection"
metaphor.
"Counterfactual-support"
for the general
PNS is supererogatory. The PNS does not formulate a law that requires
counterfactual-support (if anything really does). PNS is simple true,
new, and
methodologically fruitful (boundlessly fruitful!).
(13)
Skinner was wrong to imagine that the shape that behavior takes is a
result of
reinforcement, just as Darwin was wrong to think that the shape that
organisms
take is a result of "natural selection".
Skinner was
wrong to imagine that the origin and nature
of most nontrivial behavior is explicable merely by reinforcement
history.
Darwin, in contrast, was quite wonderfully right that the origin and
nature of
most heritable traits could be fully explained by blind variation and
retention,
based on gentoypes' survival/reproductive success.
(14)
Skinner was wrong because reinforcement learning is unable to explain
why
people do what they do: their mental states (beliefs, desires, etc.)
explain
it, and Skinner ignored those.
That's part of
why Skinner was wrong. But mental states
don't explain anything either: they themselves stand in need of
explanation.
That explanation is almost certainly going to be an
adaptive/evolutionary one,
based mainly on the performance capacities that our
evolved mental
powers conferred on us, and their contribution to our
survival/reproductive
success. The only thing that looks inexplicable in this way right now
is UG,
because of the poverty-of-the-stimulus (Harnad 2008a).
Unless UG turns out to be learnable or evolvable,
it will remain an unexplained evolutionary anomaly: an inborn trait
that was
not shaped by adaptive contingencies (Harnad 1976).
[There is one
other trait, however, that looks even more
likely never to have an adaptive explanation, nor any causal/functional
explanation at all, and that is consciousness (i.e., feeling): The fact
that
our internal functional states -- the ones that have given us the
adaptive
capacities and advantage that they have given us -- also happen to be
conscious
states (in other words, felt states) is causally inexplicable:
Unless
feeling turns out to be an independent causal force in the universe --
in other
words, unless "telekinetic dualism" turns out to be true (and all
evidence to
date suggests overwhelmingly that it is not true) -- both the existence
and the
causal role of feeling are beyond the scope of evolutionary
explanation, indeed
beyond the scope of any form of causal explanation. Feeling may be one
of those
"correlated" traits, free-riding on some other effective trait, but
it cannot have any independent causal (hence adaptive) power of its
own.]
(15)
So psychology has the option of studying the true causes of what people
do,
which are mental (whereas Skinnerian learning explains next to nothing).
Cognitive
science and evolution, together, need to
explain the origins, nature and underlying computational and neural
mechanisms
of our performance capacities, both the inherited ones and the learned
ones
(including our capacity to learn).
Yes, Skinnerian
reinforcement explains next to nothing.
(16)
But biology does not even have this option of studying the "true"
mental causes of evolutionary outcomes, because there are no mental
causes, so
all that's left is post-hoc historical explanation.
In the case of
investigating any particular heritable
trait, some specific local research -- historical, functional,
ecological,
computational -- will no doubt be necessary, plus some experimental
hypothesis-testing, as in all areas of science. But that certainly does
not
make evolutionary explanation "merely" historical: One can do
predictive
hypothesis-testing; correlated traits can be experimentally
disentangled.
Analogies and homologies can be and are studied and tested.
This is all
characteristic of reverse engineering
(Dennett 1994; Harnad 1994)
In forward engineering, an engineer deliberately designs and builds a
device,
for a purpose, applying already-known functional (engineering)
principles.
In the case of
evolution, the device is already there,
built, and the objective is to figure out how it works, and how and why
it got
that way.
No
"counterfactual-supporting cover laws"
(other than those of physics and chemistry) are needed in either
forward
engineering or reverse engineering. All they're concerned about is how
causal
devices work: For their devices, forward engineers already know. For
their
devices, reverse engineers need to figure it out.
In the case of
the human being, we have a causal device
that, among other things, has all of our cognitive and behavioral
capacities.
These include the capacity to recognize, identify, manipulate, name,
define, describe
and reason about all the objects, events, actions, states and traits
that we
humans are able to recognize, identify, manipulate, name, define,
describe, and
reason about (and that includes the natural language capacity to
understand and
produce all those verbal definitions, descriptions and deductions;
Blondin-Masse
et al. 2008).
That's a tall
order, but for cognitive reverse-engineers
it means scaling up, eventually, to a model that can pass the Turing
Test --
i.e., can do anything we can do, indistinguishably from any of us
(Harnad 2002b).
It's clear that
the "Blind Watchmaker" has
designed such a device. We are it. But all that is meant by the "Blind
Watchmaker" is that mindless mechanism of random variation in heritable
traits whose distribution changes from generation to generation as a
result of
the environment's differential effects on the survival and reproduction
of
their bearers (Dawkins 1986; Harnad 2002a).
Yes, Skinner
made a similar claim about all of behavior
being shaped by its consequences, through reinforcement, and was
monumentally
wrong. But that was because reinforcement alone can be demonstrated to
be
insufficient to "shape" most nontrivial behavior -- and in the
special case of UG, there is even the poverty-of-the-stimulus problem,
making
learning UG impossible in principle for the child.
Nevertheless,
learning (if not reinforcement learning) has
nontrivial performance power too, and computational learning theory has
already
"reverse-engineered" some of it -- enough to allow us to conclude
that (in the absence of a poverty-of-the-stimulus problem of which no
one has
yet provided even a hint -- and neither "vanishing feature
intersections" nor "correlated features" prove to be successful
stand-ins for this nonexistent poverty-of-the-stimulus problem)
the lexicon
is indeed learnable, with no need for recourse to inborn
"whirlpools" in a concept ocean that is "endogenous" to the
Big Bang (as Fodor seems to be suggesting).
Ordinary
Darwinian evolutionary precursors, in the form
of our sensorimotor categorization and manipulation capacities (Harnad 2005),
plus the evolution of language (i.e., the
evolution of the capacity to string the arbitrary names of our simple
categories
into truth-valued propositions defining and describing composite
categories)
are enough to account for the origin of both words and their meanings
(Harnad 1976;
Cangelosi et al. 2002).
For the origin
of species and their heritable traits,
PNS continues to be the only viable account on offer. (There are no
"endogenous" whirlpools that are place-holders for species and their
traits either.)
It's no fun
defending a theory that most (non-believers)
believe in. But I've had fun defending Darwin against Fodor's critique.
It has
helped bring Darwin into even clearer focus for me, and I hope it may
have the
same effect for others.
Dan
Sperber pointed out
that Darwin had
written the following on the subject of the intentionality of
artificial
selection:
"At the present
time, eminent
breeders try by methodical selection, with a distinct object in view,
to make a
new strain or sub-breed É But, for our purpose, a form of
selection, which may
be called unconscious, and which results from everyone trying to
possess and
breed from the best individual animals, is more important' (Darwin 1872, p. 26)."
This is a very
apt point. The gist of Fodor's's critique
is that "natural selection" gives rise to correlated traits, and only
further experiment can show which of the correlates were actually
causal in
enhancing survival and reproduction. Hence "natural selection" itself
is not a "counterfactual-supporting" law (indeed, it is not
"selection," because selection can only be intentional).
The fact that
intentional (artificial) selection is
indeed intentional, because we can ask the breeder "what trait did you
select for" and he can tell you, truthfully, "I selected for curly
tails" does not, of course, rule out either that curly tails are
correlated with other traits, traits that the breeder did not realize
he was
also selecting for; nor does it rule out the slightly more complex case
(because it brings out the problematic role of "unconscious
intention") that the breeder, in consciously selecting for curly tails,
was also "unconsciously selecting" for larger curly tails
rather than smaller ones. (Nor does it rule out the fact that
animal
breeders sometimes select for traits without even realizing that they
are
selecting.)
So if the
evolutionary outcome is a shift in the
distribution of heritable traits toward trait X, this can be,
(1) in the case
of animal
breeding:
because (1a) the
breeder selected X
intentionally and consciously; or
because (1b) the
breeder selected X
unconsciously; or
because (1b)
the breeder
selected some other trait Y intentionally and consciously; but also
selected
trait X, unconsciously, or
because (1d) the
breeder selected
some other trait Y intentionally and consciously, but trait X happened
to be
correlated with Y; or
because (1e) the
breeder selected
some other trait Y unconsciously, and trait X happened to be correlated
with
Y; or
(2) in the case
of "natural
selection":
because (2a)
success in survival
and reproduction increased the frequency of trait X; or
because (2b)
success in survival
and reproduction increased the frequency of trait X, but trait Y's
frequency
also increased, because trait Y was correlated with trait X, and later
(human)
experiment showed that trait X was the cause of the
survival/reproductive
success, whereas Y was just a fellow-traveller; or
because (2c)
(same as (2b) but
switch X and Y)
Clearly,
Darwin's own philosophical view on
"unconscious selectivity" does not really matter in our discussion of
Fodor's critique of Darwin. We have eight subcases, but the point about
(1) and
(2) is the same: Similar intergenerational changes in heritable trait
frequency
for X can be caused either (1) by selective breeding on the
part of a
conscious breeder or (2) by the adaptive consequences, in terms of the
survival/reproduction success of the trait itself, in the
trait-bearer's natural
environment.
In both cases,
(1) and (2), there can be correlated
traits -- traits (Y) that likewise increase in frequency because they
are
somehow coupled with trait X -- and only further experiment can
show what
those traits are, and whether or not they make a causal contribution to
the
enhanced survival/reproduction success.
In the case of
(2), further experiment would determine
whether X, Y, both (or neither) caused the increase frequency.
In the case of
(1), further (psychological) experiments
on the breeders would determine whether they would select as strongly
for X if
Y were uncoupled from X.
But chances are
that Darwin was referring to something
more fundamental than the question of conscious vs. unconscious
selectivity in
human animal breeding, namely that, either way, human selection,
whether
conscious or unconscious, is itself merely a particular case of
"natural
selection." This is how I put this point in own commentary:
Success in
survival/reproduction --
determined by the effects of the
environment on the distribution of heritable traits in the next
generation
-- is what replaces the intentional choices of the selective animal
breeder by
a mindless process.
More generally,
the case of the
effects of the intentional choices of selective breeders is just a very
special
-- and until very recently, highly atypical -- case of this same,
general,
mindless process, namely, the transmission success of
heritable traits being determined by the causal
contingencies of the environment in which they occur: Mindful animal
breeding is just one of those environments. Moreover, mindfulness
itself
is just one -- or several -- of those evolved, heritable traits: It
is
often the traits of one organism that constitute part of the
environment of
another organism, whether within or between species.
I might add --
as another complication for the notion
that conscious intentions are somehow criterial in any of this: There
is both explicit learning, in which the human
subject learns, and is conscious of, and can verbalize that -- and what
-- he
has learned, and how; and there is implicit
learning, in which the subject does indeed learn (in that his
performance
systematically changes with respect to an external criterion for
correctness), but he is not conscious of, and cannot verbalize, that
and what
he has learned, and how.
Since I am not a
believer in unconscious intentionality
(and I doubt that William of Occam would have believed in it either --
or
should have, if he was an Occamian), I think this suggests that the
baggage of
intentionality is even more supererogatory here than my explicit
analysis has
suggested.
But to see this
would be to see the truth of something that
I so far seem to be quite alone in believing, which is that the
only
difference between an intentional system and a system that is
systematically
interpretable by intentional systems as being an intentional system,
but in
reality is merely a syntactic system with no intentions, is the fact
that the
intentional system feels (i.e., is conscious) whereas the
systematically
interpretable (and
Turing-indistinguishable)
syntactic system does not. Ditto for intentional states:
The only
difference between (a) a symbol system whose symbols
are merely systematically interpretable as being about something (even
in a
robot that is Turing-indistinguishable from one of us) ("derived
intentionality") and (b) a symbol system whose symbols are not only
interpretable
as being about something but really are
about something ("intrinsic intentionality") is whether or not the
symbol system feels.
One has at least
two ways to deny this, but I don't
think either of them will be very satisfying:
(1) One can say
that there is no
difference between (a) a symbol system whose symbols are merely
systematically
interpretable as being about something and (b) a symbol
system whose
symbols really are about something. (But that would leave human
minds
indistinguishable from inert books or interactive online encyclopedias,
or toy
robots, or lifelong Turing-Test-Passing robots in the world; and that
in turn
would make "intentionality" a rather unremarkable (and nonmental)
"mark" of the mental.)
(2) If one does
not want to say
that there is no difference between (a) and (b), and one does not think
that the
difference is feeling, then one has to say (non-circularly, and
non-emptily)
what the difference is. (For me, there is no other substantive
candidate in
sight; indeed, the intentionalists don't even seem to realize that they
need
one!)
By way of an
example, my unconscious
"preference" for being complimented can even be demonstrated by
Skinner, by rewarding me with a smile and an acquiescent nod every time
I say the
word "hence." The frequency with which I would preferentially
use "hence"
would increase, reliably, given this systematic reinforcement for a
long enough
time, yet I could and would say, truly, hand on heart, that I had been
entirely
unaware of Skinner smiling whenever I said "hence," nor was I aware
that
I was saying "hence" more often -- nor was I even aware that I
preferred to be complimented!
This is, of
course a standard form of implicit learning
(Skinnerian, in this instance). One could also get this effect out of a
relatively primitive robot that was merely wired to do more often
whatever it
does that is followed by reward. Again, there is no intentionality
involved in either
case, even though in the first (human) case (me) the system does
have "intentionality" whereas in the second case
it does
not.
Nothing is really at stake in any of this for Darwin here, however.
"The
demand for continuity has, over large tracts of science, proved itself
to
possess true prophetic power. We ought therefore ourselves sincerely to
try
every possible mode of conceiving the dawn of consciousness so that it
may not
appear equivalent to the irruption into the universe of a new nature,
non-existent until then.
"Merely
to call the consciousness
'nascent' will not serve our turn. It is true that the word signifies
not yet
[p. 149] quite born, and so seems to form a sort of bridge between
existence
and nonentity. But that is a verbal quibble. The fact is that
discontinuity
comes in if a new nature comes in at all. The quantity of the latter is
quite
immaterial. The girl in 'Midshipman Easy' could not excuse the
illegitimacy of
her child by saying, 'it was a very small one.' And Consciousness,
however small,
is an illegitimate birth in any philosophy that starts without it, and
yet
professes to explain all facts by continuous evolution.
"If
evolution is to work smoothly,
consciousness in some shape must have been present at the very origin
of
things. Accordingly we find that the more clear-sighted evolutionary
philosophers are beginning to posit it there. Each atom of the nebula,
they
suppose, must have had an aboriginal atom of consciousness linked with
it; and,
just as the material atoms have formed bodies and brains by massing
themselves
together, so the mental atoms, by an analogous process of aggregation,
have
fused into those larger consciousnesses which we know in ourselves and
suppose
to exist in our fellow-animals. Some such doctrine of atomistic
hylozoism as
this is an indispensable part of a thorough-going philosophy of
evolution.
According to it there must be an infinite number of degrees of
conscious-
[p.150] ness, following the degrees of complication and aggregation of
the
primordial mind-dust. To prove the separate existence of these degrees
of
consciousness by indirect evidence, since direct intuition of them is
not to be
had, becomes therefore the first duty of psychological evolutionism." [Principles of Psychology [p. 148]
To my ears, to
reply to the question
"How
and why (and when, and since when) do some combinations of matter
(sometimes) feel?"
with
"All
'matter,' at all scales, and in all
combinations, feels, always"
sounds not only
extremely ad hoc, but exceedingly
implausible (if not incoherent), even when it comes from the pen of
William
James. (Nor does it even begin to address the real underlying problem,
which is
causality.)
I continue to
use "feels" systematically in
place of "is conscious" or "has a mind," not only because
they are all completely co-extensive, but because "feels" wears the
real problem frankly and tellingly (and anglo-saxonly) on its sleeve,
whereas
most of the other synonyms and euphemisms -- especially
"intentionality" -- obscure and equivocate.
The mark of the
mental is and always was feeling.
Without feeling, all that's left is mindless "functing" -- which is
all there is outside the biosphere (until/unless exobiology provides
evidence
to the contrary), or inside the atom, or inside any feelingless
combination of
matter, even if it does computations that are systematically
interpretable as
semantically meaningful -- and even if the symbols in its computational
"language of thought" are robotically grounded in the world via
transducers and effectors, and even at Turing-Test-scale -- as long
as it
does not feel (Harnad 2008b).
And of course
the issue is about whether something is being felt at
all, not about what is being felt, or how
much. So "degrees of
consciousness" are completely irrelevant: We are talking about an
all-or-none, 0/1 phenomenon.
Tom Nagel noted that
perhaps there is
something like the "poverty of the simulus" problem for genetic
traits, in that 4 billion years don't seem enough to converge on the
current
outcomes by chance alone (cf. Nagel 1999).
I am a complete
outsider to such calculations, but
several thoughts come to mind:
(1) For any long
enough random
time-series, the probability that the current state is reached from the
initial
state is just about zero, so that cannot be the right way to reckon it.
(2) In the case
of life, the initial
conditions matter too, because at first the alternatives were much
tighter (and
they began even before the gene).
(3) In many
ways, evolution is
playing chess with itself, because the "environment" of the
succeeding generation of the genotypes of organisms consists to a great
extent
of the genotypes of other organisms (rather than just external things
like,
say, the weather on the planet). So probably this too focuses the
options on
something less than all combinatory possibilities.
(4) It has often
been pointed out
that as organisms' genotypes and survival/reproduction contingencies
became
more structured across evolutionary time (as a result of random
mutations and
selective retention), more and more of the adaptive variation becomes
just
(random) variation in the timing and recombination of existing traits,
rather
than direct random genetic mutations that create new structures per se.
(This
is where the "evo-devo" principle comes from.)
(5) Aside from
all that, in the one
case where the notion of the "poverty-of-the-stimulus" has been made
explicit enough to formulate without hand-waving, the case of Universal
Grammar
(UG), the evidence is as follows (and I don't think the case of
heritable
biological traits in general conforms to this very specific and special
paradigm):
(5a) It turns
out that all existing
languages are compliant with Universal Grammar (UG). UG consists of the
rules
that determine which utterances are and are not grammatically
well-formed.
(5b) UG is not
taught to us, and we
do not know the rules of UG explicitly; but we know them
"implicitly," because we are able to produce all and only
UG-compliant utterances, and to perceive when utterances violate UG.
(5c) Not only is
UG not taught to
us -- indeed, its rules are not even all known yet, but are still being
explicitly learned (sic) gradually and collaboratively by generations
of
linguists, through trial and error hypothesis testing -- but UG cannot
be
learned through trial and error by the child in its language-learning
years,
because the child does not have enough evidence or time to learn UG.
(This is
the "poverty-of-the-stimulus.")
(5d)
"Poverty-of-the-stimulus"
has a very specific meaning in the case of UG: The rules of UG can
be
learned by trial and error from data (they are indeed being gradually
learned
by the generations of linguists since Noam Chomsky first posited their
existence in the mid-50s). But in order to learn which utterances are
and are
not UG-compliant (so as to find the rules that will produce all and
only the UG-compliant
ones), it is necessary -- as in learning to recognize what is and is
not in any
category -- to sample enough instances of UG-compliant and
non-UG-compliant
utterances to be able to infer the underlying rules that will
successfully
decide all further new cases (an infinite number of them). But the
child hears
and produces only UG-compliant utterances.
(5e)
To have any chance of learning the rules of UG from the
data, as the generations of linguists are doing, the child would need
to hear
or produce non-UG-compliant utterances, and be corrected, or at least
be told
that they are ungrammatical. This virtually never happens. (The child
produces,
and is corrected for, grammatical errors, but not UG errors, because
hardly
anyone ever makes a UG error -- except linguists, deliberately, in
testing
their hypotheses about what the rules of UG are.)
(5f)
Hence, as the child cannot be learning them, the child
must already be born knowing (implicitly) the rules of UG.
For this sort of
poverty-of-the-stimulus problem to
arise with the Darwinian evolution of heritable traits, it would have
to be the
case that there was no prior maladaptive
variation: The adaptive traits occurred, but the maladaptive ones
did not.
But that is not the case with evolution at all: Maladaptive traits
occur (by
chance) all the time, and are then "corrected," by the fact that they
either handicap or make survival/reproduction impossible.
So the
evolutionary counterpart of the
poverty-of-the-stimulus (for heritable traits in general) would not be
that it
simply looks too unlikely that today's traits arose out of random
recombinations and selective survival/reproductive success over 4
billion years
of trial-and-error-correction. The evolutionary counterpart of the
poverty-of-the-stimulus would be that maladaptive traits never occurred
(or did
not occur often enough) to be "corrected" by natural selection.
There is,
however, one prominent exception to this
exemption of evolution from the poverty-of-the-stimulus problem, and
that is
the evolution of UG itself!
Not to put too
fine a point on it, but it is not at all
apparent how there could be an adaptive story about how the rules of
UG,
heritably encoded in our brains, could have evolved in the same way
that
hearts, lungs, wings or eyes evolved (the usual
trial-and-error-correction
story, guided by the adaptive advantages/disadvantages). Linguists only
needed
a few generations to learn (most of) UG by trial and error, to be sure.
But
there does not seem to be any plausible way to explain how (i) what it
was that
those linguists were actually doing during those generations -- when
their
deliberate errors and hypotheses were being "corrected" by consulting
the grammatical intuitions about what is and is not UG-compliant that
were
already built into their brains (by evolution, presumably) -- can be
translated
into (ii) an adaptive scenario for what our ancient ancestors were
doing at the
advent of language, when their "errors" werebeing corrected
instead by the adaptive disadvantages of trying to speak
non-UG-compliantly!
So unless UG
turns out to be homologous with (a
free-rider on?) some other trait that does have a plausible
adaptive
history, it looks as if the poverty-of-the-stimulus problem afflicts
not only
the learnability of UG by the child, guided by external
error-correction for
non-UG-compliant utterances: it afflicts also the evolvability of UG,
guided by
the maladaptive consequences of non-UG-compliant utterances.
Chomsky's own
view is that there is something about the
very nature of (linguistic) thinking itself, such that only
UG-compliant
thought is possible at all. So whatever made (linguistic) thinking
adaptive for
our ancestors necessarily made UG-compliant verbal thinking adaptive
(because
non-UG-compliant thinking is simply impossible). (No one has yet shown,
however, how/why non-UG-compliant thinking would be impossible.)
Fodor, I think,
overgeneralizes this intuition of Chomsky's
concerning thinking itself, suggesting that it is not only UG that is
native to
(the language of) thought, but the lexicon too, or at least the terms
with
"simple" rather than composite referents and meanings
("big" and "dog," perhaps, but not "big dog" or
"standard poodle" -- to put this in the doubly contentious vocabulary
of animal breeding and its products!). (This is perhaps a legacy of
Fodor's
having taken on "generative semantics" while Chomsky handled
generative grammar, way back when; Fodor & Katz 1964.)
I think Fodor is
wrong about the lexicon, simply because
there is no poverty-of-the-stimulus problem for the learning of word
meanings (nor for the learning of the sensorimotor categories that
often
precede them): We encounter plenty of dogs and non-dogs, and we get
plenty of
corrections for calling dogs non-dogs and vice versa. And this is true
for many
of the (content) words in our dictionaries, whether composite or simple
(so
that once we have learned enough of them directly, we can learn the
rest from recombinatory
definitions based on the words we already know; Blondin-Masse et
al. 2008).
But in trying to
extrapolate the poverty-of-the-stimulus
problem to the lexicon -- arguing that just as learning was incapable
of
accounting for how we came to have UG, learning is likewise incapable
of
accounting for how we came to have the "concepts" underlying our
words -- Fodor found himself up against the other potential explanation
of the
origin of concepts: evolution.
So (if my
psychoanalysis is correct!), Fodor has been
trying to argue that evolution is no better able to explain origins
(whether the
origins of UG, or of "concepts," or even of heritable traits) than
learning is. (My own view is that for UG, Fodor is right about both
learning
and evolution; for (most) "concepts" he is already wrong about
learning, so he doesn't even need to consider evolution, because it's
unnecessary; and for heritable traits in general, he is wrong about
evolution.)
Moreover, like
Chomsky, Fodor too eventually puts the
onus on thought, suggesting that "concepts" are neither learned nor
evolved, but somehow "endogenous" to thinking itself or the capacity
to do it.
It could be. It
could be that not only UG but the
lexicon are so part and parcel of the very possibility of thinking at
all that
there is no independent story to be told about their provenance in
terms of
either learning or evolution. They might both be as "endogenous" to
the possibility of doing thinking as the eternal Platonic truths
(about, say,
prime numbers) are intrinsic to the possibility of doing mathematics.
Maybe the
lexicon just comes with the territory for anyone or anything that
thinks in the
language of thought (Fodor 1975). Who knows? I doubt it, but that may
just be
because I am lacking the right abductive intuition about this...
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